spujblemmy user(ule)s: "this sign won't stop me because i can't read"
I understand not calling disabled people the word, because mocking people for something about themselves they didn’t choose (like a disability) is cruel, I am totally on board with never using words in this way to target disabled people.
I don’t understand why I can’t use the word to mock someone who is not intellectually disabled for choosing not to use their perfectly well-functioning brain, it seems like a very apt analogy. It communicates “you aren’t disabled, you have no excuse for acting like it, start choosing to use the fully functional brain you have”.
Additionally, only the “r-word” seems to be the bad one, despite there being many other words in our language that originally began as a medical descriptor for intellectually disabled folks. If I call someone a moron for running a red light because they’re playing with their phone nobody bats an eye, but if I call them the “r-word” I’m a terrible person?
what annoys me is that no one cared about this until Sarah Palin made a big deal out of someone calling her that and she pretended to get offended for her baby with down syndrome as if it was targeted on them.
no one cared until
literally misinformation. rosa’s law was passed in 2009, four years before the incident you cite.
that’s not what we’re talking about. as the original commenter said, using the r word to refer to any mentally challenged person was already a no-no. that law changed official use of the word, not the r word itself used as an insult.
law reflects society. just providing a timeline for things, the word as an insult was a problem starting well into the 70s so it’s absolutely absurd to blame it on sarah palin in 2013.
if you think people started saying r-word in the 70s you’re out of your mind
sorry *90s that was a typo
ok, but the r word was very much acceptable through the early 2000s. it was even casually used on tv.
ok, but so was the n-word with a slightly different timeline. none of this invalidates my statement that sarah palin has nothing to do with it.